Chaucerian Obscenity in the Court of Public Opinion

Abstract

In academic writing over the past few decades, the adjective “Chaucerian” often modifies the word “irony” or other terms that imply his literary virtues. But in contemporary public discourse, the adjective more commonly refers to his legendary smuttiness. For example, when the pornographic film Debbie Does Dallas was turned into a musical for the stage, one theater critic described the resulting production as relying “on the Chaucerian tension of bawdiness, and the decidedly raunchy, to arrest and disturb.”1 In a 1993 essay pondering the use of authors' names as adjectives, David Mills confidently defined “Chaucerian” as “bawdy in an acceptably Olde Englishe way,” and much popular usage backs him up.2This essay tries to take the casually alleged fact of Chaucer's obscenity seriously, and argues that this has become the defining feature of his reputation in the United States. Though the position of Chaucer's work within the American curriculum remains marginal, and his hold on the popular imagination even more tenuous, his legendary obscenity keeps his work in view. Chaucer's work, I hope to show, has been and remains one of the principal places our culture articulates its standards of obscenity, pornography, censorship, and toleration. Despite the recent appearance of several excellent studies of Chaucer's nachleben over the last two centuries, the role Chaucer's work has played in delimiting the boundaries of acceptability has not been fully acknowledged by Chaucer's professional readers.3 Nor has this role remained static. And the evidence suggests that Chaucer's reputation may be changing: long viewed as canonical despite his obscenity, Chaucer may now be canonical because of his obscenity. The aim of this essay is not to decry or protest this dynamic, but simply to recognize it for what it is.A few definitions and disclaimers are necessary here. I use the terms “obscenity” and “pornography” deliberately, and eschew older terms like “bawdy” because these older terms are wrapped up in the rhetorical project of defending Chaucer's work from detractors, and because words like “bawdy” have little or no legal significance. No one has ever proposed anti-bawdiness laws. And in the context of this argument, “Chaucer” and “Chaucer's work” almost always means the Canterbury Tales, and only a few tales in particular. One could, of course, make a list of obscene or potentially obscene moments in Chaucer's other texts: Pandarus's notorious thrust under the bed sheets in Book 3 of Troilus and Criseyde, and the Parliament of Fowls with its smirking description of Priapus or its self-conscious peekaboo vision of Venus in her “subtyl coverchef”(272) might head such a list.4 But these works have much less prominence in the wider intellectual marketplace, receive less attention in the undergraduate curriculum, and attract far fewer readers than the Tales. As a result, they have played a much smaller role in defining Chaucer's reputation.The essay is also primarily concerned with Chaucer's reputation in the United States, for the reason that his obscenity has dominated readers' perceptions here in peculiar ways that it has not elsewhere. The Tales have been subject to very occasional indirect censorship in the U.K., but have not played a prominent role in legal arguments.5 In cases involving child pornography and pamphlets denying the Holocaust, Canadian courts have pointed to Chaucer's work in ways that resemble the use of Chaucer in U.S. cases, but these cases have not been as central to Canada's evolving standards of censorship.6 And as far as I have been able to discover, elsewhere in the English-speaking world Chaucer's reputed obscenity has only rarely been invoked in legal or public discourse.7 Chaucer's obscenity seems to have posed more problems for American audiences. The essay explores these problems in three sections. The first considers Chaucer's appearances in popular film and in the courts, the second considers responses from artists and critics, and the final section considers the way Chaucer's obscenity now defines his role in the classroom.In the 1962 musical film The Music Man, the movie's hero and conman, alias Professor Harold Hill, approaches the female elite of River City, Iowa, with a question about Marian, the town's attractive, mysterious librarian and piano teacher. The women immediately become agitated and break into a comic song (“Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little”) accusing Marian the librarian of moral turpitude: “She advocates dirty books! Chaucer! … Rabelais! … Balzac!” This accusation, linked with a claim that the librarian seduced a rich old man, becomes the song's refrain.8 Chaucer's alleged dirtiness matters (if only for a moment) in The Music Man because it is a story preoccupied with the double-edged sword of culture. The plot revolves around Professor Hill's attempt to con River City into buying musical instruments and band uniforms for its boys, a con game he advances by convincing the citizens that their children are morally endangered by the new arrival of a billiard table in town. It seems to be a struggle between the discipline of music versus the depravity of pool halls, except of course that it isn't. The marching band is only a con, a ruse, and Professor Hill really seems to be on the side of freedom and sexual license; the teenagers recognize this, and as soon he pitches the idea of a marching band at a town gathering, Iowa's young virgins begin kicking up their heels like Parisian can-can dancers. And the town library, where Marian acts the stereotypical repressive librarian, frowning and shushing while teenagers huddle in the stacks furtively reading Shakespeare and arranging trysts, constitutes the other nexus of this same confusion. Is Marian the librarian a sexually repressed bluestocking who will resist Professor Hill's advances and defeat his con game, or is she an agent of sexual liberation fighting on his side, a fallen woman passing out dirty books to any who ask? Does high culture (in the form of piano lessons and classic literature) represent discipline, civilization, and control? Or does it mean emancipation from stifling moral hypocrisy? Or is high culture simply a fraud—dirty books disguised as something else?9 Chaucer's appearance in this debate is meant to be comic; we are meant to conclude that only narrow-minded gossips would dismiss him as dirty. But the reference to Chaucer only makes sense because his work might be dirty and morally questionable.We cannot simply laugh off the concerns of those prudes in River City for the sheer reason that, in various instances, Chaucer has been pornographic, and in other instances his work has been censored. The most incontestable evidence of Chaucer's potential as pornography is a 1985 film entitled The Ribald Tales of Canterbury. This film seems to have escaped the attention of scholarship almost entirely. It merits a brief (and slightly misleading) footnote in Steve Ellis's Chaucer at Large, but nothing more in other studies of Chaucer's twentieth-century reception.10 Perhaps this inattention is not surprising, but the film nonetheless deserves some consideration alongside the many other screen and stage adaptations of the Canterbury Tales. Although most recognizable features of Chaucer's text have been sacrificed to the need for extended formulaic sex scenes at regular intervals, the screenwriter, Hyapatia Lee, has clearly read it. Indeed, the film seems to be something of a labor of love for Lee—she plays the Host(ess), ends up winning the storytelling contest with a tale of her own, and concludes the film with a sex scene between her and the Knight, who has fallen in love with her. There are only five other pilgrims (the Knight, the Miller, the Carpenter, the Wife of Bath, and the Monk), and only four tell tales. Oddly, some of the original's pornographic potential has been rejected in favor of bizarre additions—the Miller is not allowed to tell his tale, and the Carpenter's (Reeve's) tale is the only fabliau borrowed from Chaucer. But the terms of the game are recognizable, and there is considerable attention to the linking frame narrative. In this version the Miller attempts to break in after the Knight's tale, but is shouted down by the Carpenter, who tells his own. Church bells ring during the joyous concluding sex scene, recalling Alisoun and Nicholas's “revel and … melodye” (I 3652). There is even a very Chaucerian debate over the question of whether stories require morals or should simply entertain (i.e., sentence or solas). By the standards of its own genre, The Ribald Tales of Canterbury seems to be a more successful adaptation of Chaucer's text than many other twentieth-century versions; indeed, it suggests that Chaucer's work may be more readily adapted as pornography than as stage musical or television series.Just as Chaucer's work has occasionally been turned into pornography, it has also occasionally been deemed worthy of limited censorship and has become the direct subject of legal dispute. In 1985, Columbia High School in Columbia County, Florida, adopted a textbook for its “Humanities to 1500” course that included Aristophanes' Lysistrata and Chaucer's Miller's Tale.11 Some parents deemed these two texts unacceptable and complained to the school board. Eventually, the school board decided to stop using this textbook in its curriculum but kept it available in the school library. A different group of parents then filed an action against the school board, complaining that their children's first amendment rights had been violated. By 1989, the case had made its way to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, that is, one rung below the Supreme Court. The three judges unanimously agreed to uphold a previous judgment in favor of the school board and against the plaintiffs; they concluded that although “Lysistrata and The Miller's Tale are widely acclaimed masterpieces of Western literature,” the school board had “legitimate concerns regarding the appropriateness (for this high school audience) of the sexuality and vulgarity in these works.” Though the judges included exemplary passages of these texts' explicit sexuality in the footnotes of their opinion, the case did not really hinge on the question of whether Lysistrata or the Miller's Tale were too explicit for high school students. The plaintiffs did not argue this point; in their view, the texts' obscenity was simply outweighed by their status as masterpieces. Instead, the crucial issues were whether optional readings in an optional course were truly part of the curriculum (the judges decided they were), and whether sexual explicitness was proper grounds for restricting the first amendment rights of students. This latter question had been recently raised by a Supreme Court case, Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, and this subsequent case (Virgil v. School Board of Columbia County Florida) was important in defining the scope of that decision. The judges in Virgil concluded their opinion with a note of regret: Like the district court, we seriously question how young persons just below the age of majority can be harmed by these masterpieces of Western literature. However, having concluded that there is no constitutional violation, our role is not to second guess the wisdom of the Board's action.12 The judges make clear that had the school board removed the text on religious grounds, or had the text been removed from the school library, the plaintiffs might have had a stronger case. The results in Virgil suggest the essential problem of Chaucer's obscenity: though his works are undeniable “masterpieces” that cannot be fully censored, they are also undeniably obscene, and thus lie at the threshold of what should be and should not be read. Were these students a year or two older, the court suggests, their capacity to handle Chaucer's obscenity would be legally recognized; in this formulation, reading Chaucer becomes a right akin to drinking beer or buying cigarettes.13The easy adaptation of Chaucer's work as pornography and the uneasy admission that his work may be too obscene for teenagers suggests that his work lies at the boundaries of American taste, and it is precisely this role as a boundary marker that Chaucer's work has played in twentieth-century American jurisprudence. Though it has rarely been subject to widespread or direct censorship in the last century, and although many other literary works have played more famous roles in the legal battles over obscenity laws—for example, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Fanny Hill—Chaucer has often been cited as an author whose work might be censored by overly restrictive definitions of obscenity. In 1894, New York State Supreme Court Judge Morgan O'Brien ruled that various books could be openly sold without incurring the highly proscriptive Comstock laws, and argued that “high standard literature which consists of the works of Shakespeare, of Chaucer, of Laurence Sterne, and of other great English writers” cannot be “regarded as specimens of … pornographic literature.”14 O'Brien's ruling was one of the first to establish the “whole book” principle, by which works were to be judged as pornographic only by considering them in their entirety, a principle which was applied in the later cases involving Ulysses that eventually overturned the Comstock laws.Subsequent citations of Chaucer in the American legal record nearly always involve similar questions of censorship, obscenity, and/or pornography. Chaucer has been cited in cases involving Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, a suit brought by Irving Berlin against Mad Magazine's parodies of Tin Pan Alley songs, comedian George Carlin's famous routine “Seven Words You Can't Say on T.V.,” the seizure of pornographic 8mm films imported from Mexico, and a pornographic satire of an L.L. Bean clothing catalogue.15 Most recently, a dissenting judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals cited the Miller's Tale in a ruling on Finley et al. v. National Endowment for the Arts et al. This was a controversial, widely publicized case centered around four artists whose work (e.g., Karen Finley's performances involving her naked body covered in simulated feces) was denied federal funding. Judge Andrew Kleinfeld cited the misdirected kiss in the Miller's Tale as proof that “indecency sometimes helps to communicate an idea effectively” in artistic works (before arguing that the government need not pay for such art).16Judges cite John Milton's works in a wide variety of contexts, from discussions of the separation of Church and State to maritime law and patent cases. John Donne's maxim that “no man is an island” appears in similarly varied contexts; sardonic commentary on the Law from the novels of Charles Dickens naturally shows up in discussions of protracted legal reviews. And as might be expected, Shakespeare is quoted by judges, lawyers, plaintiffs, and defendants in reference to nearly everything. But Chaucer enters the American courtroom solely as a reference point for obscenity and pornography. His works are rarely quoted, but merely invoked as a widely recognized landmark of indecorous art.Outside the courtroom, Chaucer has played a similar role in other kinds of public discussions of obscenity and pornography. In the early 1980s, feminist legal scholars Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin (among others) defined pornography as a violation of civil rights, and led a charge to police pornography on these grounds. The first such attempt, the Minneapolis Civil Rights Ordinances, were debated in public hearings before the city council, and featured testimony from rape survivors, social scientists, and activists. In the midst of the hearings, Rick Osborne, a member of the Minnesota Commission on Civil Rights, raised several objections to the proposed ordinance.17 Osborne suggested that Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale—with its depiction of the loathly lady's eventual sexual submission and marital obedience—might run afoul of the ordinance's overbroad definition of pornography, while an infamous Hustler magazine cover featuring a pair of legs in meat grinder might be securely outside the scope of the same definition.Mr. Osborne's point resembles many of the other invocations of Chaucer in debates of this kind, where Chaucer's work is seen as a difficult test case—art or expression that might be censored if legal boundaries are poorly drawn. The implication is always that a law that would censor the Canterbury Tales would be obviously unacceptable. So, for example, Supreme Court Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, dissenting from the majority ruling in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation (the case involving George Carlin's “Seven Words”), suggest that the majority's rationale for forbidding on-air profanity might forbid reading Chaucer on the radio.18 The majority ruling in that case took pains to argue otherwise, noting that Chaucer would likely not be excluded by their rationale for determining obscenity, since it took into account the likely audience: Even a prime-time recitation of Geoffrey Chaucer's Miller's Tale would not be likely to command the attention of many children who are both old enough to understand and young enough to be adversely affected by passages such as: “And prively he caughte hire by the queynte.”19 All twelve justices seemed to agree that a (highly hypothetical) reading of the Canterbury Tales over the radio must be legally protected; the majority simply assumed that impressionable young people would not register its obscenity.At other moments Chaucer appears as a slightly different landmark: filth we have grown accustomed to (or at least, filth that some experienced adults have grown accustomed to). So, for example, when comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted for obscenity in 1964, a Time magazine article commented that “His words would hardly shock Army veterans, let alone Chaucer readers.”20 The startling phrase “let alone Chaucer readers” clearly indicates that Time editors saw Chaucer's work as more obscene than the language of barracks and mess halls. Similarly, in a case that appeared before the Second Circuit Appeals Court in 1962, one John Darnell was held guilty of distributing obscene material through the mail in the form of a letter he had sent to a married woman, describing sexual acts he had performed with her husband. The appeals court refused to overturn the conviction, but in a dissenting opinion Judge Leonard Moore defended Darnell's letter as “quite Chaucerian in character.”21 Moore added that the defense had failed to make proper use of this excuse: “had the defendant added parenthetically ‘in the words of Chaucer’, all would have been well, but probably neither writer nor addressee had taken a course in Chaucer.” Apparently, “Chaucer did it first” may be a legally viable defense.But it is not a foolproof defense. Perhaps the most bizarre recent use of Chaucer as an apology for obscenity comes from an incident at the University of Colorado in 2004. Colorado football players had allegedly referred to their lone female teammate Katie Hnida as a “cunt,” an attack that then became evidence in a criminal sexual assault case filed by three other women. University President Elizabeth Hoffman tried to suggest publicly that the word “cunt” had a variety of connotations and that it could even be used “as a term of endearment.” In the outrage that followed, Hoffman's spokeswoman Michele Ames claimed that Hoffman had been referring to the word's historical background, and that “Because she is a medieval scholar, she is also aware of the long history of the word dating back to at least Chaucer.”22 But as Hoffman and Ames discovered, this gambit—what might be called “the Chaucer defense” for obscenity—does not always work. Or at least the president of the Boulder chapter of the National Organization of Women, Regina Cowles, was not persuaded: “What kind of message does this send to women? What does this say to men? Go ahead and use this word because Chaucer used it?”23Chaucer, strictly speaking, did not use the word “cunt,” despite the misleading suggestions of journalists covering the Hoffman case that the word “appears throughout the Canterbury Tales.”24 But clearly the facts do not matter here; what matters is Chaucer's reputation for sexually explicit language. Chaucer, in these arguments, becomes a synonym for obscenity that has passed into the realm of the acceptable, or at least into the literary canon. His obscenity can then serve as legal cover for modern forms of obscenity or as a boundary marker for the censorship of pornography. “Father Chaucer” thus acts as a kind of Freudian primal father, who by right of his authority is permitted sexual license that delimits the rights of his cultural descendents. The legal arguments that cite Chaucer's work as a “masterpiece” rarely bother specifying which of his texts qualify, or why they are masterpieces. What matters are the twin pillars of his reputation: his unquestioned artistic authority and his obscenity.Professional Chaucer readers—scholars, artists, and writers who have considered his relationship to their own work—have crafted their own versions of this reputation for obscenity, responding to the popular reception of Chaucer with their own definitions of obscenity. As Donald Green pointed out, writers and critics have been struggling with “the cognitive dissonance involved in seeing the ‘father of English poetry’ as a dirty old man” since the moment they first raised Chaucer into the laureate's seat.25 Lydgate felt compelled to recognize that some of the Canterbury Tales were “in soth of Ribaudye/To make laughter in tho companye,” a gesture that goes beyond Chaucer's own apologies for indecency by clarifying his intent: Chaucer merely meant to amuse his readers, not to shock them.26 Most early readers who admitted Chaucer's obscenity also excused it, but by the eighteenth century readers like Daniel Defoe condemned him as “not fit for modest Persons to read.”27 And the shifting lines of literary decorum in the early nineteenth century rendered Chaucer's obscenity much more problematic than they had ever been. The Reverend William Lipscomb produced the first expurgated edition of Chaucer's works in 1795, leaving out the Miller's and Reeve's Tales as well as selected lines from other texts.28 In the following decades the Bowdlers and their followers produced a wide variety of expurgated versions; the antiquity of Chaucer's language allowed editors an exceptional range of techniques for protecting readers. Some simply left out the fabliaux from their editions, others modernized using euphemism, and others used translation to recast scenes entirely. Those who produced Middle English editions often chose to leave some terms untranslated (perhaps assuming, like the Supreme Court, that few readers who would be old enough to translate terms like queynte would be young enough to find them shocking). A rare few went further, providing misleading translations. At the close of the nineteenth century and into the first decades of the twentieth, Chaucer had become a morally suspect author—something only a few editors would admit, but that most implicitly recognized in their careful approaches to the Tales.This cautious approach reflected the expansive and vague definitions of the “Hicklin test,” the outcome of the British Obscene Publications Act of 1857 and its subsequent interpretation in the 1868 case R. v. Hicklin. This allowed for the suppression of anything that “depraves and corrupts those whose minds are open to such immoral influences,” an audience that eventually came to be defined as young people under the age of majority. The Hicklin test influenced the American Comstock laws, and its open definition of dangerous obscenity left no allowances for “classics” like Chaucer's work.29Then, something happened. The full history of the reactions against Victorian definitions of obscenity is beyond the scope of the present essay, but Judge O'Brien's 1894 decision to limit the reach of the Comstock laws (noted above) serves as a useful starting point for any such history. Judge O'Brien's insertion of Chaucer into his list of authors beyond reproach despite their evident interest in sexuality offered the terms for future writers and jurists to redefine obscenity using Chaucer as a boundary. The “artistic value” of Chaucer's depictions of sex could now be celebrated as a defense of art, or as an attack on pornography, or to make a distinction between the two categories. Public debate and professional readers of Chaucer had an incentive to excuse, deny, or mitigate Chaucer's obscenity on these grounds.Perhaps chief among those critics who celebrated Chaucer for his supposedly unconstrained depictions of sex and the human body was D. H. Lawrence. Lawrence, of course, had his own reasons for defending the unfettered representation of sex, particularly after the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1928. His essay entitled “Pornography and Obscenity” presents an indirect defense of his work by approaching the question without reference to his controversial novels. Lawrence argues that pornography is limited to “the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it,” and that frank depictions of sex are thus not always pornographic.30 Here his illustrative example is Boccaccio: “The real pornographer truly dislikes Boccaccio, because the fresh healthy naturalness of the Italian story-teller makes the modern pornographical shrimp feel the dirty worm he is.”31 And the choice of a medieval writer was no accident; Lawrence clearly believed that medieval writers were free of later inhibitions about depicting sex. In an essay from the same period, shortly before his death, “Puritanism and the Arts,” Lawrence spells out this historical theory more fully, this time using Chaucer and Shakespeare as his illustrative examples. When it comes to representing sex, “Nothing could be more lovely and fearless than Chaucer. But … Shakespeare is morbid with fear, fear of consequences.”32 Lawrence attributes the difference to the arrival of syphilis in Europe: “The appearance of syphilis in our midst gave a fearful blow to our sexual life. The real natural innocence of Chaucer was impossible after that.”33Lawrence's praise of Chaucer's “real natural innocence” in depicting sex effectively conflates several well-established traditions of Chaucer's critical reception. Lawrence fuses a tradition of praising Chaucer's naturalism (going back at least as far as Dryden) with similar language (going back perhaps to Sidney) representing Chaucer as living in an innocent, rude first age of English. Whereas some previous critics had used Chaucer's “natural” or “innocent” rudeness as an excuse for his obscenity, Lawrence turns these same qualities into a consistent set of positive attributes.Although Lawrence's approach was decidedly idiosyncratic, other artists have made similar use of Chaucer as a contrast to the sensibilities of modern pornography and as an implicit defense of their own methods. Pier Paolo Pasolini's Racconti di Canterbury attempts to make a very similar distinction between erotica and pornography, an aim Pasolini outlined in his public comments on the film: Eros is something wonderful, one of the most marvelous things in our lives…. Pornography, on the other hand, is the vulgar social exploitation of Eros. However, I do not wish to condemn pornography. If anyone wishes to indulge in pornography, let them. That's their business. And their problem. Eroticism is something wonderful while pornography is a vice like any other.34 Thus, in his Trilogia della vita, Pasolini attempts to celebrate a premodern Eros, untainted by bourgeois consumerism and modernity's illusory sense of freedom. Pasolini made strong denials that his films were meant to support the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, since he viewed that revolution with considerable skepticism: [The Trilogy of Life] is not a plea for the liberalization of sexual relations. No. In fact, if my films should by chance happen to contribute to the present forms of ‘permissiveness’, I would reject them…. The free representation of eros in my last film is the representation of sexual relations in repressive epochs: I think this is why they completely lack any suspicion of vulgarity.35 This is a claim made again and again: because Chaucer is premodern, his representations of sex are not vulgar, obscene, or pornographic. Pasolini's extensive use of nonprofessional actors in these films is clearly part of this attempt to depict precapitalist sex as “a pure biological activity” rather than vulgarly exploitative, “a special kind of authenticity ‘preserved’ from ‘the horrors’ of a bourgeois consumerist culture.”36Yet Pasolini seemed genuinely uncertain about the efficacy of this attempt to represent authentic, premodern sex. To begin with, he freely admitted that the Racconti di Canterbury reveal darker sides of human sexuality than his Decameron. Viewers will remember the extravagant opening scene of his Pardoner's Tale, with its sadomasochism and debasement of prostitutes, and Pasolini cleverly expands the Friar's claim that the summoner in his tale blackmails fornicators into a brief vignette involving two homosexuals betrayed by a spying voyeur. Pasolini attributed the differences in tone between the two films to the relative degree of bourgeois guilt felt by Chaucer and Boccaccio: [Chaucer] is already a bourgeois. He looks forward to the Protestant Revolution … But whereas Boccaccio, for example, who was also a bourgeois, had a clear conscience, with Chaucer there is already a kind of unhappy feeling, an unhappy conscience.37 In her recent study of Pasolini's trilogy, Agnès Blandeau argues that the Racconti is not the least bit nostalgic, and that along wit